John Kelly

on catastrophes, natural and otherwise

Sept. 28, 2012 3:33 p.m. ET

ENLARGE

Mr. Kelly's latest book is "The Graves Are Walking: The Great Famine and the Saga of the Irish People."
John Kelly

Bloodlands

By Timothy Snyder (2010)

1. 'Bloodlands' does what every truly important book should: It makes us see the world differently. When we think about the genocides of World War II, we think of gas chambers, of packed cattle cars rattling through the night toward a German concentration camp. These images, while valid, are incomplete. As "Bloodlands" points out, most of those who died in the black heart of the 20th century—the 1930s and 1940s—were starved, shot or worked to death in the borderlands of Eastern Europe. The region was the butt of one of history's dark jokes. Hitler looked east and concluded that the Ukraine would make a perfect breadbasket for his new empire, while Stalin looked west and concluded that collectivized Ukrainian agriculture could support "socialism in one country." Twelve years later, 14 million were dead, the vast majority of them Jews and Slavs, murdered for no better reason than that they were judged unfit to inhabit a Germanic or Soviet utopia. "Bloodlands" is a work of remembrance as well as of scholarship. It asks us to remember the little Jewish girl in Belarus who wrote to her father, "I am saying goodbye to you before I die"; the Polish officer who was shot while writing in his diary and left a sentence unfinished: "They asked for my wedding ring, which I . . ." Remember them all, "Bloodlands" asks us—for our sake as well as for theirs.

The Worst Hard Time

By Timothy Egan (2006)

2. The 'hard time' in the title is the dust bowl of the 1930s, but Timothy Egan's book is also a story about the American character; about the best in us—grit, enterprise and resilience—and the worst: hucksterism, greed and a sometimes unbounded arrogance. In the 1820s, when the Great Plains was still a land of buffalo grass, high wind and dry skies, Stephen Long, an American explorer, judged the region "wholly unsuitable" for farming. Eighty years later, speculators, the government (eager to develop the region), and settlers avid to cash in on the last great land giveaway in U.S. history, decided Long was wrong. For a while, they managed to defy nature, but their luck couldn't last. In 1929, when the stock market pushed wheat, which had been selling for $2 a bushel, to below 50 cents, thousands went broke. The next year the prairie wind, which had held its breath for decades, began to blow hard again, carrying away the fertile topsoil. In "The Grapes of Wrath" John Steinbeck wrote of those who fled the Dust Bowl; in "The Worst Hard Time" Egan writes eloquently about those who stayed and fought nature to a draw.

Plagues and Peoples

By William McNeill (1976)

3. In 'Plagues and People,' one of the seminal books of the last half-century, William McNeill introduced an important but largely ignored subject to the study of history: epidemic disease. Agriculture had lighted the flame of human pestilence by bringing us into daily contact with horses, hogs, cattle and sheep. Measles, smallpox and a host of other animal diseases promptly migrated to us; then, around 500 B.C., the creation of the city provided the population density that epidemic disease requires to flourish. McNeill's book occasionally leaves us with the feeling that nature has had it in for us ever since we abandoned our natural niche as hunter-gatherers. A second-century smallpox epidemic ultimately led to the fall of the Roman Empire; in the 14th century, the first burst of globalization produced a catastrophic epidemic. Italian merchants returning from China contracted the bubonic plague on the Eurasian steppe, and within a decade a third of Europe was dead. Human ingenuity, McNeill's book suggests, is not an unmixed blessing.

Krakatoa

By Simon Winchester (2003)

ENLARGE

Smoke rising from Krakatoa, a volcano in Indonesia, in 2009. Its devastating 1883 eruption was loud enough to be heard nearly 3,000 miles away.
Stephen Belcher/ Foto Natura/Minden Pictures/Corbis

4. Reading 'Krakatoa,' you feel as if you're sitting by a fire listening to your host tell you in a wonderful Oxbridge accent about his recent trip to this volcanic island, which was once part of the Dutch East Indies and is now part of Indonesia. Back in 1883, Krakatoa was the site of one of the most devastating geological events in recorded history. On an otherwise lovely August day, a cataclysmic eruption suddenly spit a seven-mile-high column of smoke into the sky, threw up 100-foot waves and made it rain hot rocks. "Oh, that sounds frightening," you say. "Tell me more." First, however, he gives you a history lesson on the Dutch in the East Indies, a geology lesson, and lectures on the creation of the international telegraph system and a two-ton elephant who belonged to Wilson's Great World Circus. At first, the digressions can be maddening, but each pocket lesson turns out to be so compelling that you forget your impatience, and when the big bang finally does come you see the method to his madness.

The Great Influenza

By John Barry (2004)

5. It took the collective genius of mankind four years and billions of francs, pounds, marks and dollars to slaughter 10 million men in the trenches of World War I. The influenza pandemic spawned by the war achieved much more with much less. Between 1918, when the first flu cases appeared on the desolate Kansas plains, and 1920, when the pandemic expired in the back places of Asia, the virus killed 50 million to 100 million people. In "The Great Influenza," John Barry catches the sweep of the worst biological disaster in human history in a multilayered account that encompasses the interrelationship between war and disease, the politics of Wilsonian America, and the reflexive obtuseness of the bureaucratic mind. Patriotic parades that had to be held, troop ships that had to sail, draft quotas that had to be met created large pools of vulnerable young men in the teeming military establishments in the East and Midwest. The doughboys spread the disease to the civilian population, then carried it to Europe. What makes "The Great Influenza" a standout in the vast literature on the 1918 pandemic is Barry's description of the seminal role it played in the modernization of American medicine and science. It's a novel lens through which to view the flu, one that dramatizes the critical role that crises have in driving human progress.

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